


Feed Me Your Best Line

by Ericito



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Body Image, Fantasy Racism Mentions, Fjord Is Gay in This But You Can Read Him As Bi I Guess It's Your Life, In Other Words This Is A Fjord Fic, M/M, Minor Captain Avantika/Fjord (Critical Role), Past Dubious Sexual Situations, Self-Esteem Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:03:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22970692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ericito/pseuds/Ericito
Summary: A few different people have paid Fjord compliments in his life, and most of them have been about his face, or maybe his body.Caduceus's compliments aren't about that. Fjord can't decide whether or not he wants them to be.
Relationships: Caduceus Clay/Fjord
Comments: 38
Kudos: 475





	Feed Me Your Best Line

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be a fic about Fjord trying to figure out Caduceus's sexual and romantic orientation (For No Particular Reason, He Tells Himself) and then it turned into me projecting my own mixed feelings about being validated for your appearance.
> 
> Apparently I need to write 2,000 words of Fjord character study before I can understand the poor repressed babey enough to write fic where he actually gets his shit together and kisses Caduceus. Someday I'll do that part.

When Fjord was small (he’s always been small, but when he was little), Hilde who worked at the orphanage told him he was good with numbers. _A smart kid._ It was true; books didn’t interest him, but money did, being always short on supply. And she had realized he could divide it up all sorts of ways in his head when other kids were still learning to add it.

Fjord was big for a human but small for a half-orc. He was pudgy and thin-voiced and clawed and _green_. Compliments were not a currency he did trade in, and he held onto that one like a rare ancient coin.

That changed, of course. Years later, he ditched his tusks and grew into his features, even if they were monstrous enough to make women walk much faster when alone on the street with him. He slept with a human girl, and the way she called him _gorgeous_ felt better than her hands did. When Sabian made fun of him for not being able to lift the heavier barrels on Vandren’s ship, he called him _pretty boy_ instead of just weak. 

Of course, there was also Vandren himself. Vandren used to tell him he _had potential_. Less of a compliment than the promise that one might arrive in the future. It still made him feel better and warmer than anything, better than a human girl wanting him, better than Sabian calling him pretty boy. 

It’s really a shame that, after Uk’otoa, after Avantika, the word _potential_ was ruined for him. 

The thing about Avantika was: he was terrified of her, and Caleb had told him to _do what needed to be done_ in a tone he couldn’t mistake.

The other thing about Avantika was: on paper she was gorgeous, so he wasn’t allowed to complain.

(If someone had described her on paper, though, they probably would have left out the golden eye bulging out of the palm of her hand. He pinned that hand down on the bed over her head so she couldn’t touch him with it. She laughed and didn't try to.)

Avantika had complimented him, too. When they had gone back to her quarters, he had sprawled himself on the bed, expectant, while she was still locking the door. She had turned back, seen him, and laughed. It was only then he realized what a… passive… image he must make. “You know you’re pretty, then,” she had said.

Normally, he would’ve been able to turn it ‘round on her. Call her pretty, too. The choking nerves and the persistent memory of the _eyeball in her hand_ , repulsive, stopped him. He took all her compliments with no reply.

Fjord doesn’t know when Jester stopped calling him handsome nearly so often, but he knows it was sometime around Avantika. 

At first, he was more relieved than he cared to admit. Jester was just joking. That’s what she does. But calling him Oskar, making him flex his muscles – the attention made nausea wiggle around in him. She was always so fixated on the tusks, too. He was glad when he started growing them out, and glad to see that someone appreciated them even when he couldn’t. But thinking about how she liked the tusks opened up a writhing box of snakes: _too brutish to work as human, too pretty to work as orc._

After a while, though, as her compliments slowly flowed to a trickle, he came to miss them. He came to chase after them – kissing her on the cheek, exercising in front of her – and he could almost tell himself that must mean he wants her. That he likes her in the right way.

Only almost, though. 

When he first met Caduceus, of course, Caduceus didn’t make a habit out of complimenting him. And it didn’t occur to Fjord to compliment Caduceus, on anything other than his useful mind-reading spell which Fjord assumed his goddess must have given him.

There were some things you could compliment Caduceus on, but surely Caduceus already knew about them: his skill at healing and reassuring. And as for the rest… well, Caduceus was strange and quiet and happy to fade into the background. Strange-looking, too, with his bovine nose on a narrow, angular face. Pink hair. Even his eyes were pink, and for the longest time Fjord thought it made them look bloodshot and sickly.

But with the neat trick of familiarity, Caduceus’s face had stopped seeming strange and inhuman to him months ago. 

And when Fjord was less calm and less himself than he had ever been in his life, Caduceus had been there. Strange and quiet and happy to pay him compliments as he helped him meet Melora, and as he trusted Fjord with his secrets and those of his sprawling family.

Caduceus doesn’t give the type of compliments that Jester does, or Avantika did, or even that human girl. Half of Fjord is relieved. The other half of him, the half that _wants_ that prickly and humiliating attention, is an idiot. 

Caduceus doesn’t tell him that he looks like any characters in books, because Caduceus also isn’t a big reader. He’s never told him he’s handsome, either, but the things he has called him – _special_ and _important_ and _good_ – twist a different kind of embarrassment into his stomach, only slightly less nauseating. 

That sort of compliment, for once, has nothing to do with his face. But it still comes with the urge to duck his head before anyone can look at him: his furrowed eyebrows and his puzzled smile. He feels like a book when Caduceus looks at him and says those things, one that any idiot could read and get something out of.

He’s never told Fjord he’s handsome, but there have been a few times Fjord has thought – maybe – but it’s all speculative, and why does he care? Caduceus doesn’t pay mind to _anyone’s_ good looks, and Fjord doesn’t either because he’s not fourteen years old anymore.

He’s never told Fjord he’s handsome, but there is a list in Fjord’s head that he pretends isn’t there, because he has better mysteries to be keeping track of. 

It’s not like he’s keeping count or anything, but:

 **One.**  
Caduceus said he liked his hair. It was while he was drunk, and Fjord had accidentally fished for it by complimenting Caduceus’s hair first, but he said it with the same aching sincerity with which he called Fjord _cool_. 

Fjord waited until he was alone to think about it. And then – embarrassingly – to check the mirror and run his fingers over his scalp and try to ascertain exactly what his hair must have been doing in that moment, out of curiosity. 

He thinks some of it was sticking up and out of place, actually, but maybe Caduceus likes – he corrects himself. Maybe it looks fine like that.

 **Two.**  
Caduceus said he liked his chest and arms, after Melora took pity on Fjord’s scrawny body. Well. Caduceus didn’t _say_ this one, not directly. He made a joke about it. Making jokes on purpose is un-Caddy enough that Fjord tends to remember them.

What happened was that Fjord called Caduceus the Wildmother’s favorite, joking around as well. 

“If I was her favorite,” Caduceus said, “she wouldn’t have kept me skinny and given you _all that_.” He gestured to Fjord’s arms, his torso, and Fjord’s face burnt hot enough that he had to change the subject to, of all things, their upcoming shopping trip.

Stupid, Fjord thinks. Everyone has acknowledged the changes to Fjord’s body. This is no different. It’s just the way he said _all that_ , as if there was too much of Fjord’s body to fit anywhere. As if it were a long blank stretch of canvas or something he couldn’t quite wrap his hands around. 

Stupider, Fjord thinks, not to have reassured Caduceus that being skinny isn’t a bad thing – not on him, at least. That with his height and the way he ducks his head and gently looms over people, Caduceus is too _big_ to look scrawny. He just looks… lean, willowy, like a tree. It suits a man whose life revolves around forests.

 _Like a tree._ Gods above. Maybe Fjord is glad he didn’t try to compliment Caduceus after all, if this is what he comes up with. 

**Three.**  
When they first met the minotaur, the Sunbreaker, and Nott and Jester but mostly _Nott_ decided to lose their damn minds, no one seemed to notice Caduceus in all the nonsense. As the resident lunatics discussed whether the Sunbreaker might have winked at Nott, Fjord heard: “I thought he was winking at me, but…” 

Caduceus said it quietly, not needing anyone but himself to hear it, as is the case with half his comments. But Fjord caught the amusement, and the knowingness.

And Caduceus had… looked at the Sunbreaker, too. Craned his head up a bit and taken in his armor and his muscles and the square, remotely bovine features. Caduceus had smiled to himself and kept on looking.

Fjord has added it to the list whose function he isn’t clear on, though he’s not sure it means anything for the question of whether Caduceus thinks _he's_ handsome. 

The Sunbreaker is giant, after all. Deep-voiced and rippling with muscle in a way that makes Fjord need to stand up straighter. In that way which makes his neck prickly as he becomes acutely aware of his own body, and his own voice and height.

Plus, the Sunbreaker is a minotaur and Caduceus is a firbolg and as far as Fjord can tell, they’re both types of… cowpeople? Is it offensive to call them cowpeople? If it is, Caduceus wouldn’t be offended anyway, because nothing which should annoy him does.

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that the Sunbreaker, so flat-nosed and strange-looking, is the only man Fjord has noticed Caduceus admiring. Maybe elves and humans and half-orcs are the strange-looking ones to Caduceus, and he prefers people of his own kind. 

It doesn’t really mean anything if Caduceus thought that minotaur was handsome, then. Fjord stops wondering about it.

 **Four.**  
Now that Fjord knows Caduceus’s family, and Caduceus is happy to talk about them, Fjord has felt comfortable asking questions he always wondered. Like how exactly the Clay family meant to protect the Grove’s future and pass it onto the next generation, seeing how Caduceus and his siblings might never have left home without the blight. Even as grown men and women.

Caduceus hadn’t been offended. “I can’t say as we thought much about it when we were little,” he rumbled. “And when we grew up… well, Clara was _still_ little. And Calliope and I were never going to continue the sacred line in that way, so that just left Colton. But by that time, I suppose, the Grove had bigger problems.”

That’s another item to the list Fjord pretends doesn’t exist. He tries desperately not to make too much out of it. Caduceus doesn’t talk about sex, after all, let alone marriage and pregnancy and two kids with a picket fence. He could have just meant he doesn’t care. He could have just meant he’s hopelessly bad with women. 

He could have meant any number of things, but Fjord adds it to the list anyway. 

_Calliope and I were never going to continue the sacred line in that way._

He’s just curious, is all. Fjord’s other friends talk about this sort of thing – who they do and don’t like. What they do and don’t want. Fjord knew that Beau only liked women within a day of meeting her. If Caduceus only likes men, and _that’s_ what he meant… well, it’s just funny how he’s never said so. There’s nothing wrong with being nosy about your friends.

 **Five.**  
Worst of all, Caduceus said he liked his voice. His real one, and everyone said that to him because they _had_ to, because friendship requires lying sometimes and not everyone is as good a liar as Fjord. 

But once Caduceus said it when they were alone, praying to her, and he said it in a different way. He didn’t say: “I like your voice because it’s the real you”. He didn’t say: “Your accent is fine, Fjord”. He didn’t say the things people say to make ugly people feel better.

He said: “You know who you sound like? We had this man who used to come to the Grove when I was young, to visit his sister.” Caduceus smiled, relieved to have the answer. “I’ve been trying to put a finger on who it reminded me of.”

Fjord had nodded. His face must have done something, because Caduceus answered his silent question. “He had a nice voice. I always liked that one. He played music for us.”

Fjord didn’t ask any questions about the man. All sorts of mourners visited the Grove, after all, and Caduceus mentions them often. This one is no different. 

Still, he wonders what that guy looked like. If when he played music, he also sang, and whether Caduceus had meant he liked his singing voice. If Caduceus had maybe looked forward to his visits the way any young and lonely guy might if he wanted – 

***  
It’s not like he’s kept count. He has better mysteries to be keeping track of. 

It’s just that, in his idlest moments, while shopping and bored out of his skull, he thinks about all Caduceus has to offer. Kind and passionate and oddly ambitious. Funny as hell, even if it’s usually not on purpose.

When Fjord thinks about it that way, he can almost admit to himself that he _needs_ Caduceus to find him handsome, because what else could Caduceus possibly find him? What, he reminds himself, does he offer?

But Caduceus keeps calling him _talented_ and _brave_. Not handsome. These words are not what the twisted little gremlin inside Fjord’s chest, craving the old and familiar validation, demands. 

Like any compliment, though, Fjord will take it without complaint.


End file.
